My current MacBook Pro is getting a little long in the tooth and after suffering through the 2016 and later versions at work, I will not be buying one of those until the keyboards are fixed. If iPadOS has first class terminal support I would consider making it my full time machine.
Looks like the waiting game will continue.
* Lack of a common file system so you can't use multiple apps to edit/ compile source well. * Inability to build and run locally (for iOS/ local apps) * Inability to deploy locally (for example to a web server running on your machine) * No virtualization... which would solve the above plus a few other issues. * Inability to establish persistent network connections in the background.
For terminal apps here's a couple good starters: https://ish.app https://panic.com/prompt/
You can use Coda to do remote web editing which can be useful if you have a remote build environment. There are a few other decent ways to do remote work, but building out a full local workflow on iOS is pretty much a non-starter right now.
The Files app kinda works for this.
> Inability to deploy locally (for example to a web server running on your machine)
You should be able to do this.
> You should be able to do this.
I'd love to see this. We have a fairly straight forward web development environment: Node.js + React + Typescript to build the client. The server runs on Koa and uses a MySQL database as the backend.
You think I should be able to get this going? ... I love my iPad, and I've dug around and looked for solutions and come up largely blank. Just getting the client stuff up and running using local files is... exceedingly difficult and impractical. Getting Koa + MySQL running seems like a non-starter.
This isn't some obscure stack, these are some of the most common web-dev building blocks around and it's just too much of a PITA.
I'd LOVE for this to work. So if you have some secret sauce, please share.
It's GPL3 [1], so you are welcome to compile and install on your own personal devices even if you do not have a paid Apple development subscription, though I'm pretty sure that this would require periodic compile/install cycles (every couple of weeks?).
So you have some commands including most obviously "mosh" and "ssh" but also a few others. To get a GUI configuration window you enter "config" and hit return.
Unfortunately, lately I have found that it drops input on spotty WiFi connections, both in ssh and mosh. Mosh works fine if I go offline for a while, but if the connection is really weak and packets are getting dropped I start losing input which gets scary when doing "sudo apt blabla."
Still happy with my purchase, just hoping it gets more reliable.
What are you developing? What would you need?
If they had those, I'd switch to an iPad Pro today.
I've thought about doing the same, but it just kinda irks me that I have this insanely powerful and robust tablet-form computer with good security, and I can't even have the equivalent of a Docker container. So instead I mosh into a Digital Ocean droplet and grind my teeth whenever the café's WiFi drops out. :-(
Expecting it to replace your development machine is probably not realistic.
I think it was and has been for many people.
We were all using a mix of MS-DOS/Windows, Amiga and Ataris.
What I remember was getting Small-C and K&R C compilers to kind of get corporation/university work done at home, no one was that rich enough to pay for telnet connections over long term dialups.
I won’t even use macOS due to the limitations that don’t exist anywhere else, but mostly because I think Apple makes bad decisions and then does not give me any options to change the behavior. They are such a “one size fits all” company that I just don’t understand why creative people would want to support them. Their tech is more draconian than anything.
They’re like the China of computing.
It's beyond frustrating to have to type in terminal commands in a special recovery zone to have a functional computer. Reminds me of typing grub commands at each boot to get graphics on Linux computers circa 2000 or so.
Not even the really, really big obvious (and recursive) one?
And, it’s recursively limited because of the limited choices even within their own lineup.
Enjoy your censorship I guess!
Your sarcasm is misplaced.
But you moved the goalpost on me because first you just asked for a limitation and I gave you probably the largest one. You didn’t say anything about it being an unknown limitation before I got started using it… You said “I’ll bite“ as if you could not think of one limitation of the platform. I knew about the main limitation, that you can only run it on Apple hardware, before I bought it but I decided to go forward anyway because I want to compile an app for iOS and I decided that it would be much better than trying to maintain a hackintosh.
There was zero sarcasm in my response. Not even the part where I said “enjoy your center ship I guess”, because Apple fans seem to love making my text disappear for others if I don’t gush over Apples products. If you really want to know about all of the limitations that I did not know about before I purchased into the platform I’ll be glad to do that.
Here’s a big one: you simply cannot operate the entire OS with just a keyboard unless you add some third-party usability-correction utilities. It’s impossible. And those utilities are suck and they don’t work well and there’s a chance that Apple will take them away from you or cause problems with them in any given update. That’s why Stephen Hawking always used Windows, same as just about every other disabled user in the world.